1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to datacenter workload management and high availability systems and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for achieving high availability for applications and optimizing power consumption within a datacenter.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a typical computing environment (e.g., a datacenter), one or more computers host one or more mission critical applications that need to be highly available. For example, certain mission critical applications are required to be online in order to maintain computer security, prevent confidential data leakage and/or detect malicious software programs. Generally, a computer is selected amongst the one or more available computers as a target computer that hosts the mission critical applications. In order achieve high availability for the mission critical applications, each and every computer in the datacenter remains in a standby mode or powered on. The computers are not utilized to host the mission critical applications until the target computer faults and/or fails. As a result, the other computers remain powered on and consequently, a significant amount of power is dissipated.
Currently, various power management techniques are utilized to identify and power off the one or more computers that do not host any of the mission critical applications. However, such power management techniques fail to identify the failover computer and power off that as well. Further, during a failover, starting a powered off computer takes considerable time. Furthermore, probing resources may consume additional time that may not be acceptable for the one or more mission critical applications. Consequently, a failover time is high that may not be acceptable for the one or more mission critical applications that needs to be highly available. Moreover, the mission critical applications are not available until the one or more failover computers are powered on.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for achieving high availability for applications and optimizing power consumption within a datacenter.